I once said in an interview that I couldn’t imagine what it was like not to be a professor, since I had been one my whole life. “Whole life” in practice means from the age of 23, when I held my first professorial chair in general literature at the University of Helsinki.

I came to this place in 1967 and also enrolled in the Sibelius Academy. I was admitted to study theoretical philosophy, since there was no entrance examination involved if you had six laudaturs (i.e. top grades) in the school leaving exams. This suited me well as I had studied German philosophy at upper secondary school and translated half of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Engl. Being and Time). But philosophy at the University was in the Anglo-analytical tradition and my first course was propositional calculus, and taught by S. Albert Kivinen.

Following army service I switched to the Faculty of Political Science and in 1968 began to study sociology and social psychology. But then I took aesthetics and thereafter got to know Erik Tawastjsterna. He drew me to musicology. I am thankful that I was able at that stage to try out a number of subjects. This cross-disciplinarity was safely channelled into semiotics. As far as the Sibelius Academy was concerned, I was a difficult case because I was forever heading off somewhere abroad.